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Copyright This online paper may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download it for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. in mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author’s explicit permission. But please note that: – this is a draft, – if you copy this paper you must include this copyright note, – this paper must not be used for commercial purposes or gain in any way, – note you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Werner Schiffauer “ DEMOCRATIC CULTURE AND EXTREMIST ISLAM” WERNER SCHIFFAUER DEMOCRATIC CULTURE AND EXTREMIST ISLAM When the Caliphate State of Metin Kaplan was banned on 5th December 2001 1), one of his supporters said on camera: “If one is a Muslim, one is not a democrat. If one is a democrat, one is not a Muslim.” Democracy is condemned by these believers in a very literal sense. The supporters of the Caliphate State regard democracy as the embodiment of the rule of polytheism. This is equated with the rule of evil as such: Consequently some members of the community went so far as to see in democracy the deccal himself, the Antichrist, who also appears in the final battle between good and evil of Islamic eschatology. Now one might think, that is all that needs to be said on the subject of democratic culture and extremist Islam. I believe, however, that this subject is more complex than the explicit statements might lead one to suppose. My argument is this: The internal logic of the fundamentalist gesture itself gives rises to developments which call it into question and - under favourable circumstances - can transcend it from within. In order to elaborate this thesis I would like to examine the radical critique of democracy in the Kaplan community 2) and clarify what conceptions of individual and society it is based on. The discontent with democracy My interlocutors in the Kaplan community were imbued with a vision of unity. “Once one has understood, that ultimately everything is one, then one has understood Islam.” The idea of a single, all-encompassing God is combined with the idea of a single undivided community. It finds ritual expression in the so-called five pillars of Islam: In the confessional formula (“I testify, that there is no God but Allah, and I testify, that Mohammed is God’s messenger”), no less than in the ritual prayer, through which at five fixed times of the day Moslems form a circle spanning the world and oriented to the spiritual centre of Mecca, or in the requirement to be charitable, which is linked to an admonitory formula: Only by way of the commitment to God can man act responsibly in the world; only by fulfilling his earthly duty can he do justice to God. The requirement to fast and the pilgrimage to Mecca are based on the same idea. This unity is not an unstructured one. The ideal of the inner structure can be exemplified by the star motif of Islamic art. The illustration reproduced here shows an inlay work on a 16th century Koran folding lectern. Evident at first sight is the way the elements interlock. Each element breaks down into smaller elements. These smaller elements, however, combine to make up new totalities. It is a picture puzzle, in which the parts can be constantly rearranged. Depending on the shape which has just emerged, an individual element may now be found inside and now outside. Something else is noteworthy. The border cuts through the pattern arbitrarily; there is, therefore, something capricious about the framed section. The game could be continued to infinity. This unity is not closed, but open. It is an integrated totality, whose individual elements balance one another and are in harmony. This star motif always seemed to me like a visual rendering of the social and political vision of my interlocutors. The societal units interlock. Each unit - family, kinship group, professional group, community, neighbourhood, enterprise - is related to the whole just like one of the larger or smaller elements of the star motif to the pattern as a whole. They form, as one would say today, a network. The peace of society depends on the balance of the elements. Attention to boundaries plays a special role in the preservation of the balance. The ideal is not to supersede, to dissolve boundaries, but to deal wisely with them. Boundaries must never be absolute, precisely because this would make the interlocking and internal interpenetration impossible. Their consolidation threatens the peace of society. No less threatening, however, is the dissolution of boundaries. This is associated with fitne, chaos, disorder, tohu bohu. In everyday life this culture of the boundary is expressed by a refined and elaborated ritualism: The sphere of the other is observed and respected. The idea of jihad is inscribed in this vision. Jihad means “unceasing endeavour” - and only one meaning of jihad should be translated as “holy war”. Ultimately jihad is directed at forces which want to disturb the balance of the social order. At the level of the individual jihad means the battle against the nefis, desire, which does not accept the boundaries and calls them into question: here, therefore, jihad means work on the self. At the level of society it is the will to power, the will to exploitation and expansion which does not heed boundaries and thereby calls the balance (and ultimately the beautiful order) into question. In this case there is a requirement of active resistance - if need be the Muslim is called upon to take up arms. The Christian idea of a principled profession of non-violence, was always very alien to my interlocutors. They emphasised, however, that the use of force was only legitimate as defence. Both the resistance to the nefis, that is, desires, egoism, as well as the resistance to usurpation, that is attack, colonialism appeared to them to be prescribed by reason. They emphasised the earthly responsibility for the maintenance of the beautiful and rational order. This Islamic vision of a network society forms the background to their critique of parliamentary democracy. Their arguments may be summed up as saying, that parliamentary democracy is based on a culture of conflict: The formation of opinion takes place in corporately constituted groups, the parties, which form opinion internally and then enter into debate with one another. They are exclusive, to a certain extent autonomous and can exist independently. They constitute distinct identities. In such bodies the relationship of inside and outside is fundamentally different from that in the Islamic vision of the network. Basically the democratic culture of conflict assumes the sceptical idea of duality as the foundation of anthropological constitutedness as against the optimistic idea of unity. Since no one owns the truth, regulated forms of dispute must be established. Islamicist dissatisfaction with this construction is based on the observation, that in such an order the search for reasonable solutions is exposed to powerfully distorting forces: Is it not often the case that debates are staged merely for the sake of appearances? That conflicts are started, merely for the sake of a fight? That the principal concern is the maintenance of power rather than the issue itself? In short, party democracy means discord, strife and sham conflicts. The dream of a scholars’ republic was evoked as an alternative. Conflicts that arose were to be solved by reference to the Koran, by obtaining a legal report, a fetwa. The weight of such a report is substantially dependent on the personal authority of the issuer. Thus, unlike a court judgement, the legal opinion given is only binding on someone who acknowledges this authority. But personal authority develops out of the free play of forces. As in our own university landscape more important voices become distinguished from unimportant ones, authoritative from less authoritative voices. Furthermore, every fetwa can be rescinded by better arguments. What political Muslims have in mind, therefore, is a scholars’ republic or a legal opinion state. Thus far the social and political vision. If one now looks at the actual situation in the miniature universe of the Islamicist communities in Germany, a noteworthy contrast between doctrine and reality is immediately apparent. In Germany it was from the start the case that several communities disputed the manner and means of how the social and political vision of Islam could be related to the present and realised in it. Here I am not concerned with the differences, that is, with the fact that political Islam is pluralistically organised and constituted, but with how these differences found expression. It was interesting that there was no open discussion and no openly conducted dispute about the substantial differences. But below the surface no holds were barred. The early years, especially, of the establishment of Islam in Germany, that is, from about 1968-1985, were characterised by splits within mosques and by hostile takeovers of mosque associations by competing organisations. In other words, there were deep divisions in German Islam. This was a problem, above all, for Muslims themselves, who were very well aware of the contrast between reality and beautiful ideal. They tended to explain this in terms of human weakness and inconsistency. I had the impression, however, that the splitting was precisely a result of the consistency with which they struggled to establish unity. There is a small everyday observation, which to me encapsulates the problems of the Islamic culture of conflict. In 1988, I and my acquaintances from the Kaplan community called on the Milli Görü community, from which the Kaplan community had split off five years earlier.

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